Juno - Critics love this movie!

[U'ilani]

Critics love this movie for good reason--the dialogue is sharp, witty, so teen snarky, but very realistic sounding when it's coming out of the mouths of Ellen Page and the other wonderful teen actors. The story starts out like corny, sentimental fare, but then the story continues and the complexities of real life show itself in the screenplay. Really brilliant stuff. Bring some tissue, just in case.

And if you don't believe me, read what the critics have to say.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Juno - Critics love this movie!

I really liked Ellen Page in Hard Candy. Here's to hoping that she stays just as sharp as she grows and matures.

[skeeterbess]

Re: Juno - Critics love this movie!

My friend saw this yesterday and couldn't quit talking about it at lunch today. I've added it to my "must see" list.

[liberty]

Re: Juno - Critics love this movie!

I just saw Juno yesterday and love it! Like U'ilani said, the dialogue and delivery seemed very natural. Juno reminds me of someone I went to high school with: sarcastic and quirky. Good stuff.

[scrivener]

Re: Juno

I finally got to see this.

It’s a heck of a movie. Ellen Page (Shadow Cat!) plays the title character, a high-school girl who gets pregnant and decides to carry the baby to full term. She agrees to let Vanessa and Mark (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) adopt her child. Her parents and best friend are supportive, and in his awkward teenaged way, so is the father of the child, Paulee (Michael Cera), ‘though Juno has issues with the way Paulee expresses his support.

There’s been a lot of talk about this film. Pro-choice and pro-life people each seem to be split on whether or not the message here is supportive of their arguments. I think this is evidence that it’s a good, thoughtful film. Abortion issues aside, Juno is really a film about moments (big and small) of grace, moments where the good people (and the movie is full of them, as are most of our lives) choose more often than not to extend grace rather than to pass judgment.

One scene that resonates: Juno is on her way into an abortion clinic. A schoolmate is standing all by herself outside, holding a sign and pathetically (‘though sincerely) chanting, “All babies want to get borned!” Juno chit-chats with this girl before entering the clinic, listening to what the girl has to say. There is a small measure of condescension in the exchange, but where you might expect two characters with opposing positions on such an issue to stick to rhetoric and to call each other names, you have one moment where instead they connect, still disagreeing but seeing the other as a person and not the mouthpiece for an ideal.

The movie is filled with little moments like that, not to mention much bigger moments. I find it thoughtful and believable, despite others’ criticisms about how eloquent and smart Juno is. I’ve known a lot of smart high-school girls in my life, and I think Juno is believable. She may string together words a bit more stylistically than the typical teen, but she’s not a typical teen, and I’ve known girls who’ve tried to be this cool with their sentences.

The screenplay won an Oscar, but supporting acting Oscars could as well have gone to Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Garner especially is kind of amazing in this. She’s an underrated actress because of many of the types of roles she’s played (hellloooooo Elektra!); however, she’s got some serious chops, as you might have noticed in The Invention of Lying and Catch and Release if only you’d seen them. Even her performance in the spotty (but fun) 13 Going on 30 wasn’t too far off Tom Hanks’s similar role in Big, and he was nominated for an Oscar for that.

Cera and Page do really well, too, and Jason Reitman seems to do a good job of putting his main characters in the center of the picture without making them too large for their roles in real life, if that makes any sense. They don’t seem like grownups trapped in small bodies, or like little kids behaving the way we think young people should be. Rather, they exist in exactly the place sixteen-year-olds should be in their school, in their houses, and everywhere else. An excellent soundtrack that includes several songs by Kimya Dawson feels familiar yet new, and it does a good job of setting the film in its time and place. I was humming one of the songs one day at work and my students recognized it immediately as “that song from Juno” even though none of them knew who Dawson or any of her bands were.

I have now seen all three of Jason Reitman’s major films, and I have to say I’m turning into a fan. While nothing about Juno‘s story begs to be seen or remembered, such attention is paid to the quality of all its pieces that the result is one of the most memorable films I’ve seen in a long time.

8/10 (IMDb rating)
88/100 (Criticker rating)